smart home

Qualcomm has ambitions for the Internet of Things beyond just wiring up your fridge to the web, launching a set of chipsets that will not only provide connectivity but app support to appliances. The two new embeddable boards target everything from coffee pots and rice cookers through toasters, fridges, and washer-dryers, not to mention integrating the IoT - or the "Internet of Everything" as Qualcomm prefers to describe it - with home hubs and routers. Meanwhile, there are moves to smooth the IoT setup experience, too.

Samsung has launched a new range of chipsets intended to get your home appliances online and talking to each other, borrowing smartphone chip tech for its new ARTIK range. The trio of tiny boards - as small as 12 x 12 mm - connect via Bluetooth, WiFi, or ZigBee, model depending, with Samsung hoping they find their way into everything from connected toasters and fridges to future wearables. Meanwhile, since having your coffee pot hacked is probably considered unwelcome, ARTIK has baked-in hardware encryption.

The arrival of the Apple Watch and the expected revelation of the so-called iPad Pro, or even rumors of a new Apple TV, may have distracted us from one of Apple's big iOS 8 reveals last year, but GE definitely hasn't forgotten. Its interest in smartwatches and tablets only reach as far as these devices' integration with HomeKit, Apple's platform for a connected smart home. And GE might be one of the first appliance makers to come out with a product this year, with the promise of intelligent, color-changing LED light bulbs that speak HomeKit's language.

You might recognize the Oomi name from a story we did on the gear back in January of this year. I'm not sure what happened on that first crowd-sourced funding campaign for the gear, presumably it didn’t raise the funds it needed. The Oomi product is back now and it offers the same promise of making your home smarter with an easy to deploy system.

Wink users who have suddenly found themselves without some smartness in their homes this weekend are probably painfully aware of the blunder that the company made in a recent firmware update. All hope is not yet lost, however. Wink has just posted some instructions on how to get those Smart Hubs up and running and connected to the Internet again. And in case you're not that confident with your technical know-how, they are offering free round-trip shipping to get yours fixed in a few days.

Saturday was not a good day for owners of the Wink Hub, a smart home device that allows users to control a range of home appliances with their smartphone. Of course, Wink owners are probably already aware of this, what with not being able to turn off the lights, open the garage door, adjust the thermostat, etc. See, Wink issued a new software update that, as the company puts it, made their box "so secure that it is unable to connect to the Wink servers." All of the hubs that received the update were then offline for a majority of the day.

Philips has been pushing its Hue smart lighting system for years now, but it’s taken until now, and the Hue Go, for the lamps to gain a battery for truly wireless convenience. Latest to the app-controlled line-up, the distinctive little lamp offers the same millions of color options as Hue has from the start; unlike most Hue bulbs, however, Hue Go can not only cut the cord but doesn’t demand a nearby smartphone. That flexibility comes with some compromises along the way, however; read on for my full review.

Amazon Echo is digging its voice-controlled fingers deeper into the smart home, with Amazon adding Philips Hue and Belkin WeMo support to the always-listening home assistant. The new functionality, pushed out to Echo units from today, allows owners to control their lighting, smart appliances, and switches using simple voice commands rather than reaching for the respective apps, and could well be the most useful additions Echo has seen since it began shipping in limited numbers late last year.

Kitchen tech is big money, and Googling a recipe on your iPhone while you try to remember how many tablespoons are in a cup is no longer cutting it. Orange Chef believes it has the answer with Countertop, a new smart kitchen platform that bakes in NFC and Bluetooth. Building on last-year's Prep Pad connected scale with the ability to recognize appliances from Vitamix and Crock-Pot, Countertop not only suggests - and tweaks - recipes but walks you through making them. I caught up with CEO Santiago Merea for a DIY smoothie and some kitchen geekery.

While the Almond 2015 and Almond+ have been bringing some smart functionality to the router game for some time now, today they get a big bump with home automation. The Almond 2015 has been out on the market for a couple of weeks and the Almond+ has been out for months now, but both will be getting this update from their makers at Securifi, giving them connectivity to both ZigBee and Z-Wave devices. This device doesn't work with IFTTT (at the moment), but it doesn't need to - all automation here is local.